IBM Charges Toward Consulting Services: Does Don Quixote Work at Big Blue?
January 23, 2024
This essay is the work of a dumb dinobaby. No smart software required.
It is official. IBM consultants will use smart software to provide answers to clients. Why not ask the smart software directly and skip the consultants? Why aren’t IBM consultants sufficiently informed and intelligent to answer a client’s questions directly? Is IBM admitting that its consultants lack the knowledge depth and insight necessary to solve a client’s problems? Hmmm.
“IBM Introduces IBM Consulting Advantage, an AI Services Platform and Library of Assistants to Empower Consultants” asserts in corporate marketing lingo:
IBM Consulting Assistants are accessed through an intuitive conversational interface powered by IBM Watsonx, IBM’s AI and data platform. Consultants can toggle across multiple IBM and third-party generative AI models to compare outputs and select the right model for their task, and use the platform to rapidly build and share prompts and pre-trained assistants across teams or more widely across the consulting organization. The interface also enables easy uploading of project-specific documents for rapid insights that can then be shared into common business tools.
One of the key benefits of using smart software is to allow the IBM consultants to do more in the same billable hour. Thus, one can assume that billable hours will go up. “Efficiency” may not equate to revenue generation if the AI-assisted humanoids deliver incorrect, off-point, or unverifiable outputs.
A winner with a certain large company’s sure fire technology. Thanks, MSFT second string Copilot Bing thing. Good enough.
What can the AI-turbo charged system do? A lot. Here’s what IBM marketing asserts:
The IBM Consulting Advantage platform will be applied across the breadth of IBM Consulting’s services, spanning strategy, experience, technology and operations. It is designed to work in combination with IBM Garage, a proven, collaborative engagement model to help clients fast-track innovation, realize value three times faster than traditional approaches, and transparently track business outcomes. Today’s announcement builds on IBM Consulting’s concrete steps in 2023 to further expand its expertise, tools and methods to help accelerate clients’ business transformations with enterprise-grade AI…. IBM Consulting helps accelerate business transformation for our clients through hybrid cloud and AI technologies, leveraging our open ecosystem of partners. With deep industry expertise spanning strategy, experience design, technology, and operations, we have become the trusted partner to many of the world’s most innovative and valuable companies, helping modernize and secure their most complex systems. Our 160,000 consultants embrace an open way of working and apply our proven, collaborative engagement model, IBM Garage, to scale ideas into outcomes.
I have some questions; for example:
- Will IBM hire less qualified and less expensive humans, assuming that smart software lifts them up to super star status?
- Will the system be hallucination proof; that is, what procedure ensures that decisions based on smart software assisted outputs are based on factual, reliable information?
- When a consulting engagement goes off the rails, how will IBM allocate responsibility; for example, 100 percent to the human, 50 percent to the human and 50 percent to those who were involved in building the model, or 100 percent to the client since the client made a decision and consultants just provide options and recommendations?
I look forward to IBM Watsonx’s revolutionizing consulting related to migrating COBOL from a mainframe to a hybrid environment relying on a distributed network with diverse software. Will WatsonX participate in Jeopardy again?
Stephen E Arnold, January 23, 2024
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